Development and Evolution Complexity and Change in Biology

About this book

This book surveys the key themes of rapidly changing fields and areas of controversy that are redefining the theory and philosophy of biology. It continues Stanley Salthe's investigation of evolutionary theory, begun in his influential book Evolving Hierarchical Systems, while negating the implicit philosophical mechanisms of much of that work.

Contents

Introduction - observing and making complexity, infodynamics, Aristotelian complex causality, Peircean semiotics, infodynamics in biology, the problem of change; hierarchy theory - the scalar hierarchy (Hsc), the specification hierarchy; nonequilibrium thermodynamics - the classical, externalist formulation, macroscopic information as entropic, the internalist perspective of expanding phase space, paired infodynamical perspectives, toward an infodynamics; self-organization, development, and individuation - the type/token distinction, ecological and genealogical hierarchies, development and individuation, self-organization, agency, self-organization as modelling the environment, self-organization and the collecting/cascading cycle, some new theoretical entities; the search for a theory of change - what is newness?, Newtonian "Change" - no output without input, emergence, emergence as a mode of development, change in Hegelian systems, historical dialectics, dialectics and development, notes toward modelling change; immature, mature, senescent - Darwinian cosmology, developmental cosmology, the infodynamical view of the origin and evolution of living systems. Appendices: the constructive universe and the evolutionary systems framework, Juan Alvarez de Lorenzana.

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